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I didn't want to be on screen not nailing an American accent. It's an insult to an American! There are plenty of great American actors who can already do an American accent, so me, coming in and stealing their roles, the one thing I have to perfect is the accent. So for years I practiced. And we're lucky because the whole world is raised on a library of American movies. I would pretend to be Jim Carrey, and, I say Robin Williams now because he's in my mind, but those actors really inspired us to be crazy and be theatrical.
Brenton ThwaitesYou can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
Christopher HitchensWe've also taken steps to begin construction of the keystone pipeline and the Dakota access pipelines, thousands and thousands of jobs, and put new buy American measures in place to require American steel for American pipelines. In other words, they build a pipeline in this country and we use the powers of government to make that pipeline happen, we want them to use American steel, and they're willing to do that, but nobody ever asked before I came along.
Donald TrumpWhen I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.
Colson WhiteheadIn this remarkable time for the world, I refuse to believe it's time to stop believing in the possibilities of our remarkable country. I refuse to accept the downsizing of the American Dream. I refuse to bet against American entrepreneurial spirit and American ingenuity.The competition's tough, and it requires us to be tougher - tough-minded, never hard hearted.
John F. KerryWe have to help African American people that, for the most part, are stuck there, Hispanic American people. We have Hispanic-American people that are in the inner cities and they are living in hell.
Donald TrumpI helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
Smedley ButlerWith a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.
Steve EricksonWe have to put America's security first. The American people - we on this stage need to open our ears. We need to open our ears. The American people are not whispering to us. They are screaming to us. And they're screaming to us that it's our job to actually make this government work.It's so dysfunctional under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It's so ineffective. It's so ineffectual that the American people say, we don't trust them to do anything anymore. So I'm not going to let Syrian refugees, any Syrian refugees in this country.
Chris ChristieWhen I conducted a beer-rating session last year, I wrote that most American beers taste as if they were brewed through a horse. That offended many people in the American beer industry, as well as patriots who thought I was being subversive in praising foreign beers. I have just read a little-known study of American beers. So I must apologize to the horse. At least with a horse, we'd know what we're getting.
Mike RoykoWhen Vladimir Putin runs up against American power and American criticism and American leadership that reminds him of what Russia isn`t, when he runs up against people who he worries are funding his dissidents or supporting protests against him, when he runs up against criticism of the way he runs his own country, what he`s running up against is the State Department.
Rachel MaddowNondiscrimination is a great American principle. It's a core American principle, as is religious freedom. When you have two important American principles coming into tension, into conflict with one another, our goal as Americans is to sit down and try to see if we can uphold both.
Charles HaynesAnd I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are.
Dwight D. EisenhowerEvery time I make an American film I just trust the American director and American writer. Myself, I would never make this kind of film. For me, those kinds of films are ridiculous. They don't make sense.
Jackie ChanMy favorite picture is a picture of American soldiers surrounding a guy in a foxhole, Iraqi soldier, and the American guy says, "We're not going to harm you. We're American soldiers."
George H. W. BushOur attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio - empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how - has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home - within the family, so to speak - our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.
Daniel J. BoorstinThroughout American history, the political leaders have always exhorted the American people to be nice and quiet and leave things to them. But when very serious evils confronted the American people, they had to go beyond the Congressmen and Senators, and they had to commit civil disobedience and they had even to break the law.
Howard ZinnMy father knows more about sports than any human being out there. He relaxes. The ribbing that we give each at the Christmas holidays is incredible. He's much more of an ordinary American and a proper American than a lot people would probably ever believe.
Donald Trump, Jr.Donald Trump is withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement because he wants to lower environmental standards for American products and manufacture more cheaply. His reasoning is quite simple, but very shortsighted. It won't succeed because, by doing so, Trump is missing a golden opportunity to modernize American industry.
Martin SchulzMost of our life is miscommunication, and when you add a language barrier to it, it just becomes total mayhem and confusion... It just adds to it with all of the cultural differences. It could be an American family meeting another American family and you could still have a total clash. With family, it's like visiting another planet.
Julie DelpyIt's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.
Camille PagliaWhenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
Robert KennedyIf we invest in the American people, the American people always bring this Nation a good return.
Blanche LincolnThe libertarian creed...offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy.
Murray RothbardA man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.
Mark TwainAmerican teachers have one indisputable advantage over foreign ones; they understand the American temperament and can judge its unevenness, its lights and its shadows.
John Philip SousaAs a Chinese American legislator, I applaud the RNC's Growth and Opportunity Project. Engaging Asian American and Pacific Islander communities about Republican principles is a worthwhile effort. I thank Chairman Priebus and Co-Chairman Day for making this a priority. We need to ensure our message of growth and opportunity is being heard in all communities throughout this nation, and I am proud to be a part of this effort.
Kimberly YeeI've been involved in the intelligence side of the federal government for a long time. We all know that we have to have a balance between security to protect the American people and liberty. We take an oath to protect and defend the constitution and the American people.
Barack ObamaThe function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.
Jules HenryPainters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.
Donald BarthelmeBeing American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.
Kurt VonnegutI think our time should be spent on talking about those things that unite us as Americans and deliver for the American public. And I think that is something that is a better use of everyone's time, and this is going to further the cause of the American people a lot more than focusing on divisions.
Will HurdTo say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.
Wynton MarsalisMy concern is to develop a North American type of anarchism that comes out of the American tradition, or that at least can be communicated to Americans and that takes into consideration that Americans are not any longer people of European background.
Murray BookchinCitizens must pressure the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don't create even more illness.
Andrew WeilJournalists become candidates for cardiac arrest when they see or hear an African American disagreeing with an African American. We would become inauthentic if we did not have disagreements with this president.
John ConyersEveryone in the world disagrees with me, including some managers, but I think managing in the American League is much more difficult for that very reason (having the designated hitter). In the National League, my situation is dictated for me. If I'm behind in the game, I've got to pinch hit. I've got to take my pitcher out. In the American League, you have to zero in. You have to know exactly when to take them out of there. In the National League, that's done for you.
Jim LeylandI've always liked American actors particularly. Because that was my first impression. I was very enamoured of America when I was a kid because we were surrounded by American soldiers during the war, the accent was very strange to me, it was very exotic and very captivating.
Anthony HopkinsThere is a clear and strong link between the economy's present woes and the Iraq war. The war was at least one of the factors contributing to rising oil prices - which meant Americans were spending money on imported oil, rather than on things that would stimulate the american economy. Hiring Nepalese contractors in Iraq, moreover, doesn't stimulate the American economy in the way that building a school in America would do - and obviously doesn't have the long term benefits.
Joseph StiglitzFrom the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It's not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected.
John UpdikeYou have to have a lot of respect for hot dogs. It's completely different from sandwich. First of all, the hot dog is American. Sandwiches are not American. They're different. Second of all, a hot dog is like a pop idol. Hot dogs are cute. It's a pop image - everyone knows what a hot dog is.
Takeru KobayashiI'm personally very grateful to my many friends in the Greek-American community, sons and daughters of Greece who have found success in every walk of American life.
Barack ObamaWe can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
Roger EbertCalifornia must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?
Denis KearneyA man I admire and respect - Congressman John Lewis, an American hero, made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace. That, to me, was so hurtful.
John McCainThree quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that - it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.
Noam ChomskyIn case after case, President Bush's actions have made American women less safe and less secure -- on the job and on the streets. As president, I will put American government and our legal system back on the side of women. I will stand up for their security, ensure their safety, support their rights, and guarantee their dignity. This nation can do no less.
John F. Kerry